Dialing phone to trigger audio playback over PA system

[James Miller]

Hello everyone,

I work at a hospital that currently uses a Cotronix device to play a portion of the famous Brahms lullaby over the entire hospital PA system whenever a baby is born.

My admins asked me if it would be possible to abandon our Cotronix solution and do something in-house instead.

Cisco phones are not my specialty, but it seems like it ought to be technically possible to do such a thing. I did find a few old threads on here asking about streaming music to a phone, which is similar but not identical to my situation. One thread recommended a Barix IP audio encoder, which would work for streaming audio over IP but I don't think would help with playing a specific audio file over the hospital PA on demand.

I'm eager to hear what the community might recommend. Thanks in advance for your suggestions and feedback!

[Jaime Valencia]

CUCM is call control system, meant to handle phone calls.
The suggestion you read about barix is most likely related to MOH, not your scenario.
CUCM provides nothing out of the box to do what you're asking. There is no feature for you to dial a number and play music in CUCM over a phone or speaker.

[James Miller]

Thanks for the reply. Yes, I figured there was no out-of-the-box solution. I guess I am asking for workaround solutions. In other words, I'm wondering how other users of this site may have solved a similar problem.

[Roger Kallberg]

Recommend you to do a search for “cisco phone overhead speaker”.

[James Miller]

Did you mean via Google, or here on this site? We already have overhead speakers; that's how our hospital PA system works.

[Roger Kallberg]

Either of them should do, but likely Google would be better. What you need to find is how to interface your present system with CUCM.

[TechLvr · Accepted solution]

@James Miller

A Barix IP encoder would not work in your scenario.  
I thought of a crazy but simple way to accomplish this. See if you can try it and let us know if it worked. 

In Unity Connection, create a call handler, let's say at extension 1000
On the Greeting settings page of the call handler, configure the following settings
     Callers Hear= My Personal Recording
     Times to Re-prompt Caller=0
     Delay between Re-prompts=0
     After Greeting - Call Action = Hang up
     At the bottom of this page, upload the Lullaby song in wav format

In CUCM, create a CTI route point and give it extension 1000. Assign extesnion 1000 to your internal partition.
Forward extension 1000 to VM. (At this point, when you dial extension 1000 from an IP phone, you should hear the Lullaby music).

Now, get a Cisco 8861 IP phone and connect it to your Hospital PA using the 3.5mm Jack.
If you don't have a Cisco 8861 IP phone, you can use any other Cisco IP phone + 3.5mm-RJ9/J10 adapter.

In CUCM, create a new partition, let's call it Lullaby_PT. Make sure no Calling Search Spaces have access to this partition.
Give the IP phone an extension, let's say 2000 and assign it to Lullaby_PT (no one should be able to dial extension 2000 to avoid ring tone over the PA system)
Give the IP phone a Calling Search Space that can reach extension 1000
Create a speed dial on the second line of the IP phone to extension 1000
Now, press the speed dial button, followed by the headset button.

You should be able to hear the Lullaby music over the Hospital PA system.
Note: Make sure the call connects with g711 or g722 for better audio quality
This method is only limited a single IP phone. 

[James Miller]

Thanks, I will give this a shot!

[Adam Pawlowski]

Cyberdata also makes a SIP paging amp/adapter which is capable of being triggered to play audio. It's expensive (not that an 8861 isn't) but also offers contact closure capabilities, if you wanted to also trigger it from a push button, alarm, etc. I believe you can add audio to it as a ringer/night bell type thing and then trigger it to play.